“Like and Subscribe!”

There wasn’t a YouTube before February 14th, 2005. That’s when Jawed Karim uploaded the very first video, in which he makes a very thinly veiled phallic reference:

I’m not sure you could come up with a better first video if you want to launch a new paradigm in human communication, especially having lived through the two decades that followed.

During my whole lifetime, I’ve watched formality slowly recede from language. Instead of loosely skirting subjects, people are talking directly about them now—and parts of that are really good! Of course, the silos that have simultaneously formed have made it so that you can live in a bubble of your own design if you want to.

This project must have seemed incredibly liberating to create for the three ex-PayPal employees who built YouTube out of necessity. There wasn’t a good place to share videos online, so this team simply built one from scratch. Just a year and a half later, Google bought the business for $1.5 billion.

This seemed like a lot of money back then, but most analysts put today’s value somewhere around $500 billion. Since it’s still a part of Google’s Alphabet empire, it’s tough to be any more precise than that. Something like 2.7 billion people watch a YouTube video every month, and I know some people who seem to watch 2.7 billion videos every month themselves.

I bring up the valuation for a particular reason: all that cash flowing around has a funny effect on things. It’s not all bad, mind you! Because content creators can now spend a lot of time making videos, there is some truly amazing content on YouTube these days. Besides that, there’s a ton of variety—people will make videos about anything they want, and you’re probably interested in some of those niche things too.

Of course, the negatives are pretty easy to notice if you’ve followed the space the entire time.

For one thing, there’s clickbait. Now, deceptive headlines aren’t an invention YouTube can claim, of course. Modern advertising began to embed psychological data into its thinking some time around the 1920s, and Madison Avenue has never looked back.

Here is Weird Al demonstrating exactly this back in 1984. Ron Popeil wasn’t the inventor of the infomercial, but many would argue that he perfected it, especially the line between info and entertainment:

However, the internet was the perfect grounds for a Cambrian Explosion of sorts in terms of scams, since the payoff could be instant. Light speed had a lot of funny effects for creators.

“One weird trick” turned into “you won’t believe” in ad copy on the internet, and YouTube creators started integrating similar headlines into their videos. Some headlines scream out the exact opposite of what the videos contain, and you learn to ignore channels like that if you value your time.

Of course, getting them to click is only half of the battle! You’ve got to keep them engaged, which means optimizing for watch time.

Think about what this means: if you’re a creator with two minutes of good material, why not stretch it out into ten minutes? Just throw in some fluff, some distracting graphics, and maybe sneak in a subtle nod to a sponsor, all while keeping them hanging on for the next thing that’ll happen during this epic ten minute journey.

The thing that really gets me, though, is the way creators speak. YouTube isn’t exactly a nation, but with billions of regular followers, there is a common language developing. People are starting to call this algospeak, because it caters so specifically to the algorithm that feeds people that all-important next video.

Algospeak includes the infamous like and subscribe, which is utterly ubiquitous at the end of virtually all YouTube videos. Sometimes you’ll hear it at the beginning of the video, too: Before we get started, please like, subscribe, and smash that notification bell.

It’s a bit like those tired words, where semantic satiation takes over and you just hear nonsense. Like and subscribe doesn’t really mean anything to the person saying it, but there is some hope that a viewer will be triggered into action by hearing the programming, er, suggestion.

From the perspective of the creators, this is often a matter of survival. Either they’ll optimize for watch time and the algorithm, or they’ll get buried under others who do.

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